Description
A discussion on the art project by Bénédicte Bailly and Chloé Colin (Blick Photographie) entitled “Witches of Rossillon – A Silenced Memory”, featuring excerpts from their podcast and a selection of images.
Claudie, Perronnette, Pierre, Alix, Françoise… six women and two men accused of heresy and burnt at the stake in the village square of Rossillon, in the Bugey region, in 1467.
The existence of this burning is now attested only by a single archival document: a parchment scroll held at the Côte-d’Or Departmental Archives in Dijon, which lists the accounts of the Lord of Rossillon’s castellany for the year 1467. Were they witches or simply heretics? How can we explain that a modest-sized village – with around six hundred inhabitants in the 15th century – organised a burning at the stake on such a scale at such an early stage in the history of witchcraft-related persecutions?
Whilst the archives mainly mention accusations of heresy, the event is now widely referred to in the region as a story of ‘witches’. This transformation of the narrative raises several questions: how has this episode been passed down and reinterpreted over time? What traces has it left in the imaginations and stories of the inhabitants of the Bugey?
The project ‘The Witches of Rossillon – A Silenced Memory’ aims to explore these questions by combining historical research, ethnographic investigation and artistic creation, in order to shed light on an event situated at the intersection of history and collective memory.
